TAP Portugal: day 3 of failing to sell a ticket

 

Having failed yesterday (and the day before) to get a ticket out of TAP, despite many hours trying, I thought I'd make a fresh start today.

I'm going to use a different browser, a different payment card, a different email address.  To the maximum practical extent, each shitfrastructure element used in the purchase will be different. I'll go for business class just so that everything is different.

I start by checking my shitfrastructure email inbox, in case anything pertinent happened overnight.  It's always possible they just tried against the card again and it just went through.

I have this:


 
Happily, the first stage went well with chromium, with the dropdown lists containing the right elements.  It's 2021, and a web site not truncating its dropdown lists is a happy moment.

The next stage is to change to email, follow some link, and continue the sign-up.  It's at this stage that I get to finally choose a password.  After the usual attempts to follow password rules (at least the page states what they are), I have finally done it, and ...


"An error occurred".  It says "Sorry, it is currently not possible to validate the information provided".  You have to admire the ambiguity.  The error message contains nothing actionable.  It doesn't say which end they think the error is.  Taken at face value, it could mean that the information I provided is okay, but their validation infrastructure is currently down, or it could mean.. anything else.

Shall I guess that it was because I was using plus-addressing, so I could use a different address from the one I used for my original account (that I can't log in to and can't rescue) that still goes to the same mailbox?

Shall I guess that it's because I was back in firefox because I had to switch to email half way through a workflow, and my gmail is in firefox?

What state is the nascent account now in?

Let's try copying the link from gmail and using it in chromium.

Same deal.

Looking at the previous page, though, I spot something wrong:


The local part of the email address was supposed to be "tgj211+flytap2", but here there is a space where that plus should be.  This does not falsify the hypothesis that plus-addressing caused the problem.  The funny thing is, the confirmation email, whatever you call it, got through just fine to the address with the plus in it:


Looks like adhoc email address "validation" and "normalisation" rules are being made up on the spot by different sets of retards, or perhaps by the same retard in a different mood.  That's how email address validation and normalisation is done.

Can I invoice TAP for three days of web consulting now?



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

the persistent idiocy of "privileged ports" on Unix

TCP and UDP have ports.  These are 16 bit; there are 65535 or so per IP address. These protocols don't care to differentiate between the ports.  Elsewhere, IANA presumes to operate a process to allocate "well-known" ports in the range 1-1023, "registered ports" in the range 1024-49151, and to reserve the remainder, 49152–65535, for "ephemeral" ports.  The caller end has to have a port, which is how replies get back within the virtual connection, and these are conventionally picked from the ephemeral range by the OS's networking stack. The whole idea of ports is ridiculous, because it allows ISPs to arse around presuming to decide which services they will "not allow".  Anything that allows IPSs to do anything other than shift opaque packets will allow ISPs to meddle and break things, and due to the Law of Meddling, if they can, they will.  I am currently working around an issue with Claro, a pretend ISP, blocking port 5060, allocated to SI
Read more

google is giving more and more 500 errors

Image
Total state capture and moral bankruptcy are not the only problems facing Google.  They are also giving an increasing rate of 500 Internal Server errors.  This is the sort that means they've messed up, but not in a way that they should have messed up.  On the other hand, they have drawn a lovely picture of a robot falling apart. Today's example is from Google Calendar under calendar.google.com.  I was trying to make an appointment, and now I'm doing this. I remember, in 2018, a friend trying to convince me that 500 Internal Server Errors no longer happened, or if they did it was my fault, and that they hadn't seen any for years, and some other things.  They assured me that they would love to see screenshots of such a rare specimen, which I bored them with for a while.  That friend happens to be a Google employee. Well, there are plenty of others posting about Google Calendar on twitter today, including screenshots of 500 Internal Server errors, so I doubt this one is en
Read more

7 minute workout: a straightforward audio recording (and two broken google web sites)

Image
 Last year I had a simple rendition of the 7 minute workout routine recorded by a voice artist . I wanted a simple audio track to help get the timings right.  I used to have a good "app" that did it, but that handset died.  Subsequent "app"s have got rubbisher and rubbisher, by having mega-configurable exercise order and making it complicated, with intrusive advertising, by synthesizing unpleasant robot voices instead of simply recording a human voice, and by making everything sound so pumped. Youtube video mmq5zZfmIws is not bad, but they have not been able to resist having ads, and a quick part of the morning routine can not have ads, it's just too tacky.  But one can watch someone doing each exercise and see how to do it properly.  Incidentally, they are at 30M views, also because daily routine.  The track I got recorded, in m4a format, is: https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=1c91iH6XJrfCiItTJErJAmIbNdGuHN0tr (direct download link) https://dr
Read more